


The Angel, the Witch and the Wardrobe

by Aluminium



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Gen, I'm Sorry, SRS2012, they probably end up corrupt tyrants, who have to be overthrown by Team Free Will
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2012-11-29
Updated: 2012-12-01
Packaged: 2017-11-19 20:43:50
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,629
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/577451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aluminium/pseuds/Aluminium
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: "I'd love to see a The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe AU featuring the (human!)archangels as the Pevensies? Can be gen or shippy, and feel free to include other characters ;)"</p><p>Written for Supernatural Rarepair Shipfest, Bonus Round One. Hence the distinct lack of shipping.</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. What Raphael Found

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thirtyspells](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts?recipient=thirtyspells).



> With love, from Al.

** What Raphael Found **

On the seventh of December, 1940, the snow was so thick that it caked the windows like powdered sugar, and aged Professor whose home the Miltons shared ( _temporarily_ , Michael had been quick to insist) informed them that he wished to spend the day alone. He was a kind man, if somewhat absentminded, and he generally let them roam the house and the surrounding fields as they pleased. It was just as well, because the nearest village was three hours away by bicycle, down and back up the valley and over the other side, and if he hadn’t been so lenient, the children’s stay would have seemed less of an extended holiday and more like imprisonment.

As it was, the Professor’s house was as fascinating to the children as any place in the whole world, for it seemed a labyrinth of twisting hallways. There were spare rooms and hidden cupboards and creaky old passages to explore, and crawlspaces and dank cellars and ornate furniture covered in dust sheets, which looked like the bones of ancient dead things before the boys threw open the moth-eaten curtains to get a better look.

The weather had not changed one bit since they arrived a week before, Michael and Lucifer and Raphael and Gabriel, all four brothers together, piling onto the Professor’s doorstep in the same clothes they’d worn when their parents saw them off at King’s Cross. They’d been indoors ever since, and on the first night they had all sat in Michael’s room and made a pact.

“We have to be methodical,” Michael told them. He had an air of authority that all older siblings who are at all worth the title have mastered by the age of ten, and Michael was thirteen, so he was the Miltons’ undisputed leader. It never stopped Lucifer arguing with him, but that day even he was too excited to disagree. None of them had ever set a foot outside of London, and suddenly their world had become incomprehensible in its sheer sprawling size.

“The weather has been truly dreadful since we first left home,” Michael continued, “and there’s no reason to believe that it will improve. So we’ll leave no room unexplored, if the Professor will allow us, and then we shan’t get bored all winter.”

Raphael, who was the youngest, added that he agreed, which made Gabriel – who was two years his senior – and Lucifer – who was two years older again – grumble that that was what he always did, no matter what Michael said.

“You’re trying to sound like Father,” Lucifer added, sourly. “You always do this when he isn’t around.”

Even so, he didn’t press the point, and there was no bite to it. They were much too tired for that, and exhilarated, too, though they missed their parents more than any of them would let on.

And they had done exactly as they had promised for an entire week, keeping themselves quietly entertained the whole time, and the Professor thanked them for that, on the morning of the seventh, smiling a little blearily at them across the breakfast table. He asked that they continue to amuse themselves for one more week, during which he only wished to be left in peace in his study, and on Saturday he would take them into town with him to meet some other boys and girls, who had had to leave their parents, too.

The boys were so touched by his kindness that they all agreed immediately, even though Raphael and Michael would much rather other children left them well enough alone, and Gabriel started guiltily every time the Professor spoke. To his immense horror, he and Lucifer had already managed to break three antique Chinese vases they had found in the attic. The shards were hidden under their beds, because nobody was sure whether the Professor was allowed to send them away for bad behaviour.

(Three weeks later, Gabriel confessed anyway, and Lucifer refused to talk to him for hours. The Professor only told them that he didn’t remember _owning_ Chinese vases, so they’d probably done him a great service in getting rid of them.)

By the seventh they had already investigated most of the house, so they pressed on and began to explore the abandoned East wing. They hadn’t been there yet at all, and found to their extreme disappointment that it was far less interesting than anything they had already seen. There was almost nothing there: no furniture, no pictures, and boards on all the windows.

Lucifer was the first to tire of wandering empty rooms. “I’m going back to the basement,” he said. He had been the first of them to muster the courage to go down there, closely followed by a very hesitant Gabriel, and Michael had had to follow them down as quickly as he dared and bear the embarrassment silently. “You can come too, but I don’t suppose any of you are brave enough.”

Michael puffed up his chest imperiously. “I’m too old to play silly games in the dark with gullible-“

Lucifer left whilst he was still talking, and Michael went very red and stormed out after him.

That left Raphael and Gabriel. Gabriel looked around surreptitiously, just a flicker of a glance from side to side, like he didn’t think Raphael would notice. In truth, he felt a queer sort of apprehension pool in his gut when he saw the broken slats of sunlight streaking through the windows, and all the little drab scars on the walls where pictures must once have hung. It was like exploring the house of someone dead, even though the Professor was the most mild mannered man they had ever met – and very much alive.

“If you go to the kitchens,” Raphael suggested, trying to sound enthusiastic, “Miss Bradbury might give you a snack.” Miss Bradbury was the cook and the maid at the Professor’s house, and she seemed to be the Professor’s only friend. She was as gentle and caring as he was, in just as distracted a way, though she always seemed to have far too much to be doing about the house, whereas he simply spent his time lost in the sort of deep, ponderous thoughts that people are hesitant to share.

That, at any rate, was enough of an excuse for Gabriel, and he trotted happily away, expression transformed from dour to beaming in a moment.

Raphael stared after him, ambivalent, for three full minutes before he decided that he didn’t care for a snack. Or, for that matter, for Michael and Lucifer’s arguments. Frankly, he liked the East wing. It was quiet, and though he loved his brothers, they were quietness’ antithesis.

Once he was on his own, there was no reason to be methodical. The East wing was uniform, if nothing else; no one had dusted or swept or aired the rooms in years, and for the most part there wasn’t much worthy of dusting or sweeping or airing. Of course, much of the house had been abandoned to moths and time, but it made the rest look forbidden and enticing. It made the East wing look lonely.

Four doors down, none of which he tried, Raphael went up two steps and down six more, turned a corner and found himself at the end of the corridor. Stairs led up to the next floor, and a fifth door rested half ajar.

He thought about it for a moment, twisting his mind into shapes, and came to the conclusion that this room must be right at the corner of the house’s north side, overlooking the garden. He wondered if the view would be pretty, and if the windows might have been left unboarded to preserve it.

Inside, there was no more decoration than elsewhere, so nothing caught Raphael’s eye; the windows really were boarded, and much too high to peer out of, too. But this room was special, he realised, because unlike all the others it wasn’t empty. Right against the outside wall, tall and plain and proud, stood a wardrobe. It was the kind with a mirror on the doors, both of which were pulled to.

Raphael didn’t suppose anyone would store their clothes in the East wing. Nobody stored much of anything in the East wing. Something else, then.

It could be anything, but it probably wasn’t dangerous, so Raphael tugged the doors open, just a crack.

And, knowing that it was unutterably silly to pull wardrobe doors closed behind oneself, when Raphael stepped into the wardrobe – just trying to find the back, mind you; he only really wanted to see if there was anything stored _behind_ the coats – he left the doors ajar.


	2. The Angel in the Woods

**The Angel in the Woods**

Beyond the fur coats, Raphael expected to find hooks on the wardrobe back, or maybe shelves. Really, he only wanted to know why anyone would keep this wardrobe in particular all alone in an abandoned wing of their house.

One day, many years later, the entire mystery would resolve itself into perfect clarity. That December, it was all simply very confusing for Raphael. It seemed the more coats he pushed aside, the further back the wardrobe went. It was leaning against an outside wall: there could not even have been a secret passage or an old chimney for the back to lead onto, and at any rate, no matter how much Raphael’s hands scrabbled for purchase, he never felt brick.

He was simply travelling within the wardrobe, which seemed to grow longer and longer as he pressed his way through it.

Presently, he felt something crunch beneath his feet, and the fur was replaced by strange, wet, cold needles pressing against his hands. The needles were attached to tree branches, and when he knelt, he found that he was standing on snow. Not the snow falling outside the Professor’s house, which was the powdery kind that never sticks together properly to make much of anything, but the thick, soft sort of snow that forms a crust on its surface and is just wet enough to sculpt.

Before him, the snow covered a bed of leaf litter, and the trees formed a dense pine wood. Behind him were the coats.

Unlike Gabriel and Lucifer, Raphael was a practical boy. The other two would wander off, he knew, certain that they had stepped into the pages of the adventure novels they spent so much of their time devouring. And Michael – Michael would tell everyone to stay calm and leave the snow and the trees and the other world behind, and go to the Professor, and then they would all be banned from ever visiting again.

But Raphael was practical, so he glanced behind himself to see the tiny window of watery light that was the wardrobe doors, and set out in as straight a line as he could walk, feet thumping damply in the snow. He went in the direction of the sun, which was just visible through the thick cloud – it must have stopped snowing some time ago, though his breath still plumed in the air.

It was only a few steps before something became visible through the trees. It was a lamp post, a stark non sequiter in the untouched woodland. More curious, however, was the figure beside it. It was a girl, Raphael thought at first, of a similar age to Michael, with beautiful long red hair and a petulant expression. She was wearing silky white robes that covered her from her neck to her ankles, though her feet were bare, and she seemed to be carrying a torch. Only, when he took a few very ginger steps forward to get a proper look, there were two flames, and neither were attached to anything but her back. They didn’t seem to hurt her, and they weren’t burning her clothes.

The girl had a pair of wings made entirely of fire.

“Good day,” Raphael said to her, because he knew to mind his manners around strangers. “How do you do?” He was still being practical, but in the end, he did not keep his distance. The girl looked utterly harmless – she was, after all, maybe an inch taller than he was – and only a little shocked to see him, and when he spoke the flames on her back flickered and danced like they were being stirred by a stiff breeze.

“Very well, thank you.” She seemed to say it on principle, as though she wasn’t really paying attention. He supposed she was still shocked that he had found his way into her forest. “Only, if you’ll excuse me for asking, where exactly did you come from?”

“The wardrobe,” Raphael admitted. “In one of the Professor’s spare rooms.”

“Oh,” said she. “I’m ever so sorry.” She really did look it, and very embarrassed, too. But she spoke confidently, as though she wasn’t necessarily afraid of strangers even when they surprised her alone in the woods. “I’m afraid that I’ve never heard of the City of Ward Robe… though I’m sure it’s an awfully beautiful place to live. Why, does the Professor rule over many places?” The wings died down a little, smouldering. “I’m terrible at geography,” the girl confessed. “I’ve never even left Narnia.”

She seemed awfully friendly, for a stranger, and so Raphael didn’t correct her about the wardrobe in case she was offended. Instead, he moved to shake her hand. “I’m Raphael,” he said. “And I’m not very good at geography, either.” (He was being diplomatic. Raphael could name every capital in Europe.)

“I’m Anna,” she replied, and smiled. “It’s terribly lonely to live here, you know. I’ve never met any other children before- other than my brothers, I mean…” For a moment, her expression darkened – only in the slightest of ways, the corners of her lips flickering momentarily downward, and her wings rippling and flattening – and then she blinked it away and spoke a little more quickly. “How old are you, anyway?”

“I’m eight,” Raphael said, more than a little proudly. “And three quarters.”

Anna was so impressed, any reservations Raphael still possessed were dispelled in their entirety. More than that, though, she was baffled. “Two hundred and eight and three quarters?” she asked, wrinkling her nose.

“No,” he said. “Just eight. And three quarters.”

“I’m two hundred and twelve.” She frowned. “You’re not even fifty – you’re only a baby. But you look as old as me. If you don’t mind me asking…” Once more, her wings flickered, and she curled her toes in the snow, like there was something she didn’t want to say. “What are you?”

“I’m a boy,” Raphael explained. “And you can’t be two hundred. You’d be an old lady.”

“Two hundred and _twelve_.”

“You can’t be that, either.”

“Well,” she said finally, arms folded, “maybe I’m not a lady. I’m an angel. We don’t have ladies in Narnia. Or boys, either.” She pursed her lips, and looked an awful lot like Michael, all of a sudden, only with more sparks. “Anyway, I’m not old. You’re just human.”

Raphael scowled. “Why’s that matter? And what are you, then?”

Anna, it turned out, was an angel. Anna had lived in the forest her whole entire life, and it hadn’t always been winter, even though it was now, but back when it wasn’t she had had the best of adventures (Raphael told her she didn’t look like a very adventurous person, given how pristine her robes were, and she hit him on the arm and made him apologise). The adventures had been with fairies, and werewolves, and ghosts and wendigos, because nothing in the woods was really very scary to angels. You could play all sorts of games with fairies, and sing and dance with them, and if they ever scared you you could just spill salt on the ground, and they’d have to count every single grain before they chased you. Werewolves were alright once you got used to them, and they played the best games of tag. Ghosts were sometimes very sad, but they could hide like no one else in the entire world, and move things with only their thoughts, and they cheered up as long as they had company. Wendigos were, she confessed, a little bit scary.

“But just a little,” she amended, as she opened the door to her home.

Inside was a single, simple room, with a table and two chairs, a dresser, a small wood fire, a neat little carpet and three lamps around the room that Anna lit using a small splint and her left wing. There was a bookshelf filled with thick, leather-bound tomes, the kind that even Michael didn’t usually try to read, with names like ‘All Quiet on the Telmar River’ and ‘The Importance of Being Clyde’. Two were open on the table. The first was called ‘The Human Delusion’, and sentences were underlined with a bitten pencil. The second was a Narnian dictionary.

Anna put the kettle on, talking all the while. She and Raphael talked all evening: not of anything in particular, but about his elder brothers, and her younger brothers (he was too polite to ask where they were) and how the forest looked in Summer, and all the fables Anna had ever heard about humans. She had never known that they were real.

“I’d never seen an angel, either,” said Raphael, “But I knew that they were real.” He took another sip of his tea, which was hot and sweet and made him feel drowsy. He noticed that Anna had barely touched her own. Maybe it would put out her wings if she drank some. “I don’t blame you.”

“I blame me!” Anna declared, and to his astonishment, he saw that she was shaking. He wasn’t sure what to do when his brothers cried, never mind an angel girl he had only known for an afternoon, so he gave her his handkerchief and took another gulp of tea as she wrung it between her hands.

She cried so much that her wings began to stutter, and that made her cry even more. Eventually, she stopped. Then she seemed to realise what a mess she had made, and was so utterly ashamed that she sniffled and hiccoughed and started crying all over again. It took five minutes of awkward silence on Raphael’s part before she stopped, during which he felt drowsier and drowsier.

“I’m sorry,” she said suddenly, with fervour. It sounded like she was trying to be stern with herself. Her eyebrows were bunched resolutely. “I’m afraid I’m not a very nice angel.”

“I wouldn’t know,” Raphael assured her. “I haven’t met any others.” He felt queer and floaty, and the lights blurred when he shook his head to clear it.

“You’re too kind,” she said, darkly. “I’m the worst angel I’ve ever met. I’ve tricked a little boy into staying in my house, and poisoned his tea so he’ll fall asleep as I talk.”

“Well…” It was getting harder to think. The dresser swam and Anna’s wings melded with the fire under the chimney. “Just don’t do it again, alright?”

“You don’t understand!” Anna wailed, though she was more exasperated than distressed, if the lack of tears meant anything. “That’s what I’ve done to you!”

To his terror, Raphael found his eyelids were too heavy to wrench open. “Why?” he asked, voice distant and drowsy.

The last thing he heard before he fell asleep was Anna saying a woman’s name, but it slipped from his mind like water from cupped hands.

It must have been hours before he woke again, and when he did, Anna was sat on her hands, worrying her bottom lip between her teeth. The tea was cleared away. “Are you alright?” she asked.

Honestly, it felt like waking from a deep and satisfying sleep, every bit of drowsiness purged from Raphael’s mind. Each thought was sharper than before. He said as much.

“It was only sleeping medicine,” she confessed. “I didn’t put in enough to hurt you.” The rest came out in a rush, before he could reply. “Only, I don’t know what to do! I promised to the Queen that I would report any humans I saw, and now that I haven’t given you to her, she’ll hurt my brothers. I don’t want that, Raphael – she turned them to stone already, and I haven’t seen them in so very, very long…”

Now that he was a little more awake, and a little more aware of the problem, Raphael really did comfort her. He stood and put an arm around her, somewhat stiffly, and asked if he couldn’t just leave before the Queen found out.

“No,” Anna said sadly, leaning into his shoulder (her wings didn’t hurt at all – they seemed to pass through his arm without touching it). “I don’t think so. Even some of the trees are on her side. They might whisper to her, and she’ll know that I betrayed her, and then Castiel and Balthazar will- they’ll-“

“We won’t let her,” Raphael told her, firmly. “I’ll leave very quickly, and she’ll never know I was here.”

“Only if you never ever come back,” Anna mumbled.

“I have to,” he argued. “Because we’re going to save your brothers. It’s only right.” It was what Michael would do, after all, and probably Lucifer and Gabriel, if only they’d met Anna too.

Anna stared at him for a long time.“One person doesn’t stand a chance against the Queen… “ Finally, she nodded. “But two might.” They didn’t consider it for long, though, because then Raphael remembered that his brothers must be worrying, and he ran all the way back to the wardrobe doors.

He let her keep the handkerchief so that he would have to come back again.

**Author's Note:**

> So, mercilessly riffing off C. S. Lewis' writing style without become overly simplistic is nigh impossible. I may not have appreciated this as a kid, but seriously, dude could _write_.
> 
> Anyway, here's to hoping you enjoyed this. I think it will be three chapters, but I'm not adverse to extending it.


End file.
